If you mint a series of, say one hundred monkey pictures, and you buy one from yourself for $10k, you now have $1m in monkey pictures. The 2.5 points on a 10k transaction to create $1m is worth it.
You only have $1M if you can convince someone else to buy the rest at the "market price". Otherwise you have -$10k.
This is true, except you have only lost the $250 in fees. Some people are able to, some people are not.
And NFT traders are savvy to duplicated projects being illegitimate. There is only value in the verifiably legitimate project. If you bought a bored Ape that was "right click + save"d and published on OpenSea, it would be worthless.
I was referring to the actual bored ape nft. And all the other scams following the same pattern.